The present invention relates to solutions for capturing energy from fluid flow and, more particularly, to systems for turning wave and fluid energy into electrical energy. The main focus of the invention is on wave energy from oceans, rivers, lakes, and dams, but the principles are meant to apply to other liquids and gases and the invention has other applications. The present invention covers the numerous parts that make this invention work, and some variations of the devices, but in all cases the invention deals with the problem of obtaining electricity from waves in a better manner than what is currently available.
Sources of renewable energy have been widely sought after, but each one has its own problems. Recently, interest has increased in the possibility of obtaining electrical energy from ocean waves. Current art machines have at least one of the following defects: they are large, expensive, hard to construct, waste thermodynamic energy through crashing of waves, do not make full use of both the horizontal and vertical vectors of wave movements, and do not exploit principles of fluid motion such as the Bernoulli and Navier Stokes principles (increased flow speed and lift superior to a wing and improved flow from adjacent structures) and Green's Law (that a shallower bottom increases the amplitude of the wave) to make the energy in waves easier to capture.
The present invention describes several devices and methods of obtaining energy from wave flows and improving the efficiency of existing devices at the same time. (The current patent uses terms such as water, liquid, and fluid interchangeably, since the major embodiment of the patent is envisioned to be water, but in other embodiments the current patent can apply to other fluids and gases.) The present invention also applies Green's law of the amplitude of waves (that amplitude increases by h to the negative ¼, where h is the water depth) by confining the vertical space near a rotational device to make wave energy easier to capture by increasing the wave amplitude. Innovations of the present invention include devices and methods to maximize the utilization of wave energy in both horizontal and vertical vectors simultaneously. Very simply, the present invention makes the energy easier to capture, and then captures it.
No equivalent or near-equivalent system for wave energy capture has been found in the current art.
There is thus a widely recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have, a more efficient and cheaper method of obtaining energy from fluid motion.